


Dumped

by ibided



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Comfort Food, Darcy likes power ballads, I'm Bad At Tagging, Ice Cream, Jane Foster makes a mistake, Reformed Loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 21:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1201846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ibided/pseuds/ibided
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jane gets too big for her britches, Darcy pays the price and Loki applies ice cream to where it hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dumped

**Author's Note:**

> Set about a year after Thor: The Dark World. Feel free to make up your own backstory as to why Loki is there and why he is kinda nice.

Dumped.

Callously, unceremoniously dumped.

Welcome to Dumpsville, population: Darcy Lewis.

Perhaps, karmically it was her own fault for dropping Ian the way she did, both figuratively and literally. But that didn’t make her feel any better.

It was like the last three years had meant nothing. As if they hadn’t both been fighting over control of the van when Jane had hit Thor. As if they hadn’t both faced annihilation at the hands of a giant fire-breathing robot from space. As if Darcy hadn’t been right there by Jane’s side as she searched and searched for her alien Viking boyfriend (also from space).

As if they hadn’t both held their breath and clutched each other’s hands as they anxiously waited for news from New York; or celebrated Darcy’s graduation and subsequently bemoaned the apparent crappy job market for Political Science graduates. (It seemed that the words Summa Cum Laude meant nothing to a prospective employer anymore. Either that or S.H.I.E.L.D had been un-greasing some wheels on Darcy’s behalf. Jerks.)

After the events of the Convergence, things had begun looking up for Dr Jane Foster in a serious way. The scientific community no longer collectively laughed in her face when she spoke about her theories; her research had begun to turn heads. Slowly, at first, because everyone’s ‘official position’ was to deny knowledge of Dark Elves or spaceships or portals to other realms. But Thor was back, and he was a little harder to sweep under the rug, even when he was trying to be discreet. (And, as Loki had put it, Thor wouldn’t know discreet if it stole Mjolnir and repeatedly bashed him over the head with it.)

And so, little by little Jane had gained funding, some respect, a new intern and a Loki. Not necessarily in that order. The latter, whose intellect increased the average IQ of the team by about 50 points, was a godsend (pun intended). In his millennia of life he had gathered enough knowledge of the universe to give Jane a multiple brain-gasm just by being in the room and she had wasted no time in mining for precious gems.

But all the funding and recognition had gone (in Darcy’s humble opinion) to Jane’s head, and the brilliant astrophysicist had decided that, in order to work with her, one must have a doctorate or a genius level IQ. Never mind that Darcy had been a loyal friend and intern for all those years, or that she had been busting her hump to keep up with Jane’s now-considerable flow of data, or that she had helped defend the world against Buddy the Cranky Elf. What did all of that get her? 

Let go, that’s what.

So now she was jobless, internship-less, and reference-less after she had told the good doctor where to shove it.

“I’m sorry, Darce,” Jane had said. “But we can still be friends.”

“Oh, can we Jane?” Darcy had asked in a sarcastically saccharine voice. “Can we, please?” And then she had gathered up her jacket and iPod and stormed out furiously. 

Darcy Lewis had never been one to mope, and she didn’t plan to start anytime soon. Instead when life got her down, she would take action, grab the bull by the horns and make lemonade. Or something. 

So she polished up her resume and applied for half a dozen new jobs, cleaned every inch of her tiny apartment, baked gooey cherry chocolate chip cookies, knitted a new scarf and caught up on all her favourite fan-fictions. It was almost enough to keep the pain of betrayal at bay.

Almost.

But she was lonely and bored and her power-ballad playlist and a whole internet full of baby animal pictures were no longer sufficient to cheer poor Darcy up. It was an indication of the quality of her days that a knock on the door was a highlight.

That is, until she opened the door and found herself at eye level with forest green clad pectoral muscles and a pair of broad shoulders. Really, the guy was just too damn tall.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I see unemployment has done nothing to improve your manners,” Loki commented drily, “May I come in?”

Darcy shrugged. “Fine. But don’t expect me to roll out the red carpet for your royal ass.” She moved aside to let him in.

“Believe me, my expectations are low enough, even for you.” He looked around the place as if inspecting a particularly nasty-looking wound.

“Gee, thanks,” Darcy rolled her eyes. “Did you come here just to insult me and look down your nose at my home? I repeat: why are you here?”

Loki looked at her with an air of condescending patience. An expression that she had come to know as his I’m-about-to-do-something-nice-but-I-don’t-want-to-ruin-my-badass-reputation look. “I understand that among Midgardian women there is a specific way of cheering oneself up.” From behind his back he produced a pint of chocolate fudge brownie ice-cream. 

Darcy’s eyes lit up with delight. “Well, the application of ice-cream is a method traditionally employed after a break-up of a romantic kind, but what the hell.” She took the frozen treat from him and began absentmindedly stroking the carton. “Although I’m not sure it’s enough to share.”

“No need.” With a twist of his wrist Loki produced another carton from thin air, this time containing butterscotch flavoured ice-cream. “I brought one each.”

“Wait a minute,” she said with a frown. “Did you steal these?”

Loki put his hand to his chest in a show of feigned offence. “Darcy, you wound me! I only steal things that people have no desire to part with.”

“Like their souls?” suggested Darcy, skipping into the kitchen.

Loki smirked. “No. Those tend to be given freely or in exchange for something else of value.”

Scoffing inelegantly, Darcy re-emerged with two spoons and handed one to Loki. “Yeah right. Tell that to Erik!” A shadow passed over Loki’s face and a look of horror came over Darcy’s. “Oh my god. I’m really sorry. That was kinda mean.”

Loki gave a minute one-shoulder shrug and settled himself on the loveseat – right in the middle, long legs splayed wide. “It matters not. I am not undeserving of such words.”  
Darcy curled up with her ice-cream in her super squishy armchair, took off the lid and began licking the chocolaty goodness from the underside. “It doesn’t matter if it was deserved or not,” she stated between licks. “It was still mean, and I’m still sorry. Besides, I heard that you might not have been entirely in control of your actions during that whole bunch of shenanigans.”

“Who told you that?” Loki looked up at her sharply.

“Ummm Thor… Apparently your mom had her suspicions. She said most likely you felt ashamed of being brainwashed and would rather keep your pride and stay in prison than admit to something that you perceived as a weakness.” She paused briefly. “This probably isn’t helping you to not want to kill me, is it?”

“Darcy, were I inclined to kill you, your absurd taste in music would have driven me to do it long ago. The honesty and courage with which you speak your mind only serves to endear you to me.” He scooped up a spoonful of ice-cream and added quietly, “You would think that after a millennium I would have stopped underestimating that woman. But then again, Odin never did, and I learned far too much from him.”

There followed a few minutes of silence only punctuated by soft whimpers of delight as Darcy licked and sucked her ice-cream off her spoon. Loki was pretty sure such noises should be made illegal outside of the bedroom.

“Thank you so much for this Loki,” Darcy said eventually. “I’ve had the crappiest week. But I still don’t quite understand why you are here. I mean you are literally the last person in the world I expected to see outside my door on a Friday afternoon.”

Loki shrugged again. “Ian and Jane mentioned that you hadn’t been answering or returning their calls so I thought I would check on you.”

“But why?” Darcy pressed. “I mean, since when do you care if one of us measly humans drops off the radar… or dies? Besides, you talk to Jane way more than you ever talk to me; I kinda thought you’d be on her side with this whole thing.”

“Darcy, you are one of the few humans I have come to care for. Jane only tolerates me for the sake of Thor and because of my superior knowledge; the interns both fear me and avoid me as much as they can; and Thor mourns for his brother that no longer exists. You accept me as I am; you are irreverent and sometimes crass and probably entirely too trusting, but you treat everyone you come across with the same level of respect, whether they have a history of trying to take over your planet or they are the one-eyed director of an espionage agency.”

“Sooo…you’re saying that you missed me?”

“…Yes.”

“Awww!”

“And I believe Jane’s dismissal of you to be most unjust.”

Darcy made a face. “Apparently I was the least productive member of the team. It’s not fair. Not all of us can have giant science brains. And I thought we were friends. It seems I’m entirely expendable.”

“Someone like Dr Foster seeks to understand the world through numbers and formulas. She is interested in the mechanics of the world whereas you understand the heart of things. She misunderstood your value. But believe me when I tell you that she is now beginning to understand.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Hey, have you learnt the interns’ names yet?”

Loki smirked, “If they want me to call them Ian and Amy, first they must stop responding when I call them Intern One and Intern Two.”

Darcy snickered quietly and then looked down at her ice-cream. “Hey did you magic this so that it never melts?” 

Loki favoured her with a wicked smile that she simultaneously found incredibly hot and entirely untrustworthy. “Maybe.”

“You know, you’re kind of awesome.”

“I know.”

“And extremely cocky.”

“With good reason.”

“Do you want to stay for dinner? I was gonna order pizza. And I have wine to go with it, ‘cause what’s classier than pizza, right?”

“Thank you, yes. Jane Foster has been attempting to teach my brother how to cook,” Loki grimaced. “The results have been mixed.”

 

The following Thursday Jane was looking through the logged data, trying to find the specifics of an event that they had recorded only a few days ago. The entire lab seemed somehow quieter than it used to be and colder, as if they had suddenly been plunged into winter in the middle of August. The entire team was on edge as well. Amy would snap at Ian for no reason and Ian would sulk for hours; Thor was bored, and a bored Thor was an annoying Thor; Jane herself seemed to be lacking her usual focus and Loki’s unending sass had begun to take on a more malicious edge.

Jane sipped on her sub-par coffee and resisted the urge to growl incoherently at the computer screen.

“Who input this data?” she demanded.

“Intern One,” Loki answered immediately. 

“Why is half of it missing, Ian?”

“I-I’m sorry Doctor Foster, but it’s just that your hand writing is really quite hard to read,” Ian explained.

That was true, and even Jane wouldn’t try to argue there, but in the last three years it had never been such an issue. “And what, suddenly in the last two weeks this has become a problem? You’ve never missed data before.”

“Actually,” Amy spoke up, “it was always Darcy who did the data entry.”

“And made the coffee,” Loki added, looking down at his mug. “To call this stuff bilge-snipe piss would be an insult to bilge-snipes everywhere.”

“Hey!” Thor protested. “I tried my best.”

Jane buried her head in her hands and moaned. “I’ve made a terrible mistake, haven’t I?”

“Yes!” answered four voices from around the room.

“But how am I supposed to ask her back if she won’t even answer my calls?”

Loki stood and walked over to where Jane was melting in a puddle of despair and handed her his phone. “It’s already dialling.”

“Yallow?” a familiar voice chirped from the little speaker.

“Darcy?” Jane’s voice was desperate. “Please don’t hang up.”

 

And that was how Darcy got her job back – with no small amount of begging on Jane’s part, of course.

**Author's Note:**

> For the record I'm not a Jane-hater, this was more of a what-if kind of thing. Everybody makes mistakes, right?


End file.
